Our Education System Is Killing Creativity

The
global war for talent proves that it will only get tougher
for companies to attract and retain top talent.

Employers need innovative minds, but this talent is increasingly
hard to come by, because people are discouraged to think outside the box
throughout their lives.

It all starts with our
education system, which then influences the way our companies are
run, and the way we think, argued Sir Ken Robinson in
hiswildly-popular TED
Talk.

We recently came across a 2012
NPR interview with Robinson, where he spoke about how
thecurrent education system chastises those
who break out of the mold, because in order to do that, you have
to be prepared to be wrong.

In our current system, making a mistake is stigmatized, even
though making mistakes and taking chances is the only way we can
come up with new ideas. He says that many people lose the
fearlessness of their youth as they get older:

"Kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go.
They're not frightened of being wrong ...
What we do
know is if you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come
up with anything original. By the time they get to be adults, most
kids have lost that capacity ...And we run companies like this ...
And now we're running national education systems where
mistakes are the worst thing you can
make. And the result is we're educating
people out of their creative capacity.
Human communities depend
upon the diversity of talent, not a singular conception of
ability."

Robinson said there's too much of an emphasis on "the one right
answer" and this might not actually exist in the real world
today.

Around the 19th century, the
education system around the world was invented to center around
the needs of that time: Industrialism.

We've sincegone through several cultural waves, and
we're now in a knowledge economy. The essential value of our time
is entrepreneurialism, which requires us to use our brains in
entirely different ways. In order for companies and countries to
stay competitive, we need to take a hard look at how we're
teaching children — and adults — to think.